MEMS tackles contextual awareness

PORTLAND, Ore. -- Future wearable electronic devices will automatically respond to the context of a user's actions depending on whether they are at home, work or driving, according to Invensense Inc. which unveiled its wearable Contextual Awareness System Development Kit (CA-SDK) at this week's Consumer Electronics Show.

The wearable CA-SDK looks like a watch and includes a nine-axis inertial navigation unit, the MPU-9250.Invensense (Sunnyvale, Calif.) announced at last CES an earlier version of its 9-axis IMU at last year's CES that was bundled with its on-chip MotionTracking algorithms which sense the orientation, location and motion of smartphones, tablets and other consumer electronics devices. This year it has shrunk its INU from 4x4 to 3x3 mm, plus extended its motion-tracking algorithms to sense the context in which a device is being used, creating virtual sensors that can change their function depending on activity.

The 9-axis INU is available alone or on Invensense's wrist-worn software development kit that looks like a watch and houses a 1.7- by 1.5-inch pc board containing its new MPU-9250 INU with integral motion tracking software plus its contextual awareness algorithms. It also features derivative calculations such as calorie burn rate.

One incredibly basic - but extremely useful - feature would be for authentication into a computer. As it is, I work in one location and live in another. Everytime I move my laptop from one place to the other, all of my on-line accounts put me through the authentication interrogation drill before they'll let me in. Cookies don't help. Maybe this could enable a computer to have a "profile for each location". [Or perhaps a programmer could program the on-line financial websites correctly to understand that we are a mobile generation and recognize standard locations for the same user and computer.]

Great idea. You could also embed security based upon a persons normal movement to type or move the mouse. Everybody is different, so once you train your system to recognize just you, then anyone else would be instantly identified. You could then have the systems camera take their picture, so you know who tried to hack you.
Just a thought.

Yaw, pitch, roll via 3 axis gyroscope.
X, Y, Z via 3 axis accelerometer.
This makes 6 axis of positional information.
I have a serious issue in claiming a compass has another 3 axis of usable inputs. To begin with, a compass only has 2 axis and only provides orientation with respect to the earth. I can only see this as providing a reference point to a direction in 3-D space no matter the orientation, just as an accelerometer can always tell you where gravity is.
The compass is merely a supplement to the existing 6 axis configuration, it does NOT add 3 more axis (if so, what are they?). 9 input, yes ... 9 axis is merely a marketing term. By that logic, adding a GPS input would make it 12 axis.